The document discusses Shelley's importance as a Romantic poet. Some key points made are: - Shelley's poems focus on extreme human emotion and the wonders of nature, both hallmarks of Romanticism. - Romantics valued emotion over reason and a return to nature. Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark" praises the bird's "unpremeditated art" and asks readers to listen, not analyze. - Compared to earlier Romantics, Shelley portrayed nature as indifferent to human suffering and a backdrop for themes of man's insignificance.

2. 1. Shelley As A Lyrical Poet:
Shelley was the revolutionary idealist, a prophet
of hope and faith. He was a visionary who dreamed of the
Golden Age. Shelley’s was constructive and he
incarnated that aspect of the French Revolution which
aimed at building up a new and beautiful edifice on the
ruins of the old and the ugly. Shelley’s motive impulse
was Love.
The essence of all his poetical works is his
prophecy of the new-born age. In his first long poem, Queen
Mab, which he wrote when he was eighteen, he condemns
kings, governments, church, property, marriage and
Christianity. In his superb lyrical drama we find the fullest and
finest expression of Shelley’s faith and hope. He began to
imagine the new world which would come into existence
when all these forms of error and hatred had disappeared.

3.  Conti…
Shelley’s reputation as a poet lies mainly in
his lyrical power. He is in fact the greatest lyrical poet of
England. In all these poems mentioned above, it is
lyrical rapture which in unique. In the whole of English
poetry there is no utterance as spontaneous as
Shelley’s and nowhere does the thought flow with such
irresistible melody. Besides these longer poems Shelley
wrote a number of small lyrics of exquisite beauty, such
as ‘To Constantia Singing’, the ‘Ozymandias’ sonnet, the
“Stanzas written in Dejection’, the ‘Ode to the West
Wind’, ‘Cloud’, ‘Skylark’; ‘O World! O life! O time’. It is in
fact in the foundation of these beautiful lyrics, which are
absolutely consummate and unsurpassed the whole
range of English lyrical poetry, that Shelley’s real
reputation as a poet lies.

4. Conti…
As poet of Nature, Shelley was inspired by the
spirit of love which was not limited to mankind but
extended to every living creature to animals and flowers,
to elements, to the whole Nature. He, therefore, holds
passionate communion with the universe, and becomes
one with the lark ( To a Skylark), with the cloud ( The
Cloud), and west wind (Ode to the West Wind) to which
he utters forth this passionate, lyrical appeal:
 Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one.

5. 2. Browning’s poetry passion
Passion is expressed in Browning’s poetry in
crude elemental form. He aims to show that truth lies in
both evil and good. Browning uses passion in his
poetry. Browning’s poems are written in dramatic
monologue. It is ‘The Ring and the Book’, he tells
suspenseful story of murder giving multiple
perspective. Understanding the thoughts, feelings and
motivation of characters give sense of passion for the
characters. In his poem ‘Two in the Campagna’ he
captures passionate aspects into the words. This style
of poetry is used by Browning regularly for example in
‘Love Among The Ruins’ he once again depicts
passionately his thoughts.

6. Conti….
Crude elemental form means in a natural way,
which is more relatable. Browning spoke the strongest
words of hope and faith. Browning is the most stimulating
poet in the English language. His influence on the reader
when he reads his poetry is positive and tremendous.
Robert Browning is the poet of man. According to him, the
life in this world is worth living and this is the passionate
crude aspect of his poetry. Browning wrote love poems both
personal and dramatic. Some of his poems convey
passionate aspect of love. What has been termed as raw
passion in its crude elemental form. The intensity of feeling
which to Browning was essential to life naturally find
expression in poems dealing with basic human emotion as
love.

7. Conti…
In his poems, there is reflection of infinite
passion. Realism is central working principle of Browning’s
poetry and elemental passion is certainly part of this
realism. It can be pointed out that elemental passion
consists not merely of love but also of such feelings as
envy, jealousy, suspicion etc. The chief fault of Browning’s
poetry is obscurity. This is mainly due to the fact that his
thought is often so obscure or subtle that language cannot
express it perfectly. Being interested in the study of the
individual soul, never exactly alike in any two men, he seeks
to express the hidden motives and principles which govern
individual action. Thus in order to understand his poems,
the reader has always to be mentally alert; otherwise he
fails to understand his fine shades of psychological study.

8. 3. Yeast’s Poetic Devices:
William Butler Yeast was one of the most
important of modern poets, who exerted a great influence
on his contemporaries as well as successors. He was an
Irish, and could never reconcile himself to the English
habits and way of thinking. By temperament he was a
dreamer, a visionary, who fell under the spell of the folk-
lore and the superstitions of the Irish peasantry. Like them
he believed in fairies gnomes, and demons, in the truth of
dreams and in personal immorality. Naturally with such a
type of temperament, Yeats felt himself a stranger in the
world dominated by science, technology and rationalism.
Yeats trusted in the faculty of imagination and admired
those ages when imagination reigned supreme. Thus he
went deeper and farther in the range of folk-lore and
mythology.

9. Conti…
Poetic devices are a form of literary device used in
poetry. A poem is created out of poetic devices composite
of: structural, grammatical, rhythmic, metrical, verbal,
and visual elements. They are essentially tools that a poet
uses to create rhythm, enhance a poem's meaning, or
intensify a mood or feeling. Poetic devices based on the
sound of words used by W.B Yeats are:
 Alliteration:
Use of the same sound at the start of words occurring
together e.g. Moody music.
 Assonance:
Repetition of vowel sounds e.g. Odd one out.
 Atmosphere:
Prevailing tone or mood.

10. Conti…
 Euphemism:
Inoffensive word or phrase substituted for one
considered to be offensive or upsetting.
 Hyperbole:
Deliberate exaggeration for effect.
 Imagery:
Descriptive language that evokes sensory experience.
 Irony:
Mildly sarcastic use of words to imply the opposite of
what is said.
 Metaphor:
Comparison made without using the words like or as.

11. Conti…
 Oxymoron:
Figure of speech that combines two apparently
contradictory ideas e.g. cruel kindness.
 Paradox:
Statement that seems self-contradictory but may be true.
 Personification:
Give human characteristics to an inanimate object.
 Rhyme:
Sameness of the final sounds at the ends of lines of
verse, or in words.
 Rhythm:
Regular movement or beat.

12. Conti…
 Simile:
Comparison made using the words like or as.
 Theme:
Main idea or subject being discussed.
 Onomatopoeia:
Use of a word which imitates the sound it represents e.g.
Hiss.
 Climax:
Most intense point of an experience, series of events or
story.

13. 4. The use of quotation, contrast and
parallelism in ‘The Waste Land’:
 Quotation used in “The Waste Land”:-
“Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. (263-265)”
You wouldn't think that Eliot would be all that
impressed with the "clatter and chatter" (262) of fishermen
lounging in a pub. But the fact the he connects them to the
interior of a church he really admires shows that he's actually
quite fond of the old salts. Here, the nostalgia of "The Waste
Land" is slathered on pretty thickly. In this passage, Eliot is
suggesting that even the lower classes live with a certain dignity
in a world that is given meaning by religion. But for Eliot, this is
a world that barely still exists, if at all.

14. Conti…
”Burning Burning Burning Burning,
O Lord Thou pluckiest me out,
O Lord Thou pluckiest ,
Burning (308-311)”
The burning of this passage might make you
think of hellfire at first (and rightfully so), but it also might
refer to the "Fire Sermon" from which this section of the
poem takes its name. The Fire Sermon is not actually a
Christian reference, but an allusion to the spiritual teacher
Buddha, who taught people to resist their worldly appetites
for sex, money, and power in order to live a life of peace.
From this point onward, "The Waste Land" starts to look at
non-Christian religions as potential places of rebirth for
Western culture. Eliot especially seems to like the idea
of asceticism, which means giving up all worldly pleasures
in order to pursue a life of spiritual enlightenment. If today's
Western culture is any indication, though, Eliot might have
lost that battle.

15. Conti….
 Contrast:
Contrasting of Past with present in Waste Land. Contrast
of Past with Present in The Waste Land Eliot contrasts the
past with the present in several ways throughout his poem,
The Waste Land. In this case, the juxtaposition is used to
hold the modern attitude toward sex and love next to an
attitude from the past.
According to Eliot tradition is a living culture which is
inherited from the past and also has an important function in
forming (shaping) the present. To Eliot tradition is bound up
with historical sense of a poet or writer. Historical sense is
a perception that past is not something that is lost or invalid.
The title itself indicates Eliot's attitude towards his
contemporary society, as he uses the idea of a dry and
sterile wasteland as a metaphor for Europe devastated by
war and desperate for spiritual replenishment.

16. Conti….
 Parallelism:
Eliot creates a parallel between past and present,
where past is something which is unified, has spiritual significance,
is joyous, harmonizing. The poet also fears his own end, therefore
he too submits himself to the God. Through the poem Eliot
highlights the need to belief in God, attain true self and be
redeemed. Eliot’s vast scholarship is reflected in literary allusions,
symbols and myths. He deliberately chooses the mythical method
for obvious advantages. Secondly, it bridges the gulf between the
crises in human history and civilization. It gives a sense of the
continuity of time and human consciousness. Eliot mentions a
number of wastelands which are so much alike; the Biblical
wasteland, the wasteland of King Oedipus, the wasteland of King
Fisher, and the modern wasteland. The root cause of these
wastelands, their barrenness and desolation was loss of moral
values and sexual perversion. The way to regeneration and
salvation is given by Eliot in the last section in the words of the
Thunder.

17. 5. Browning’s complex nature of
his poetry:
 Robert Browning as a poet relished fresh ideas and new
forms:
Robert Browning creates a complex character in his poem
"My Last Duchess" by using a technique called "the dramatic
monologue." In this, the character (in this case, the Duke) is
allowed to speak for himself, allowing the audience to overhear
the character's thoughts. Thus rather than simply describe the
character from the outside, which can be one dimension,
Browning allows layers of characters to emerge in the process
of self-revelation

18. Conti….
The Duke, in giving the envoy a tour of his castle initially
appears gracious and sophisticated, but gradually reveals
that he is callous and possessive. The personality layers, in
which we see his collecting of art objects to color his attitude
towards his wife, whom he regarded as one more of his
possessions are revealed first in the beginning, when he
describes his deceased wife in terms that show no mourning
for her death but merely aesthetic appreciation:
“That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if, she was alive. I call
That piece, a wonder now:”
It comes to a climax when we discover the cause of her death.

19. Conti….
Browning aspires to redefine the aesthetic. The rough
language of his poems often matches the personalities of his
speakers. Browning uses colloquialisms, inarticulate sounds
(like “Grr”), and rough meter to portray inner conflict and to
show characters living in the real world. In his earlier poems
this kind of speech often accompanies patterned rhyme
schemes; “My Last Duchess,” for example, uses rhymed
couplets. The disjunction between form and content or form
and language suggests some of the conflict being described
in the poems, whether the conflict is between two moral
contentions or is a conflict between aesthetics and ethics as
systems. Browning’s rough meters and unpoetic language
test a new range for the aesthetic.

20. 6. Shelley’s importance as a
romantic poet:
The Romantics favored extreme emotion over logic and/or
reason because they felt that there was simply something
more natural about emotion. We come into the world knowing
how to feel, how to feel deeply, but reason is something that
we have to learn later on. Therefore, for them, emotion felt
more fundamentally human, and thus better. Percy Shelley's
poems show this interest in extreme human emotion in their
subject matter.
In addition to this focus on human emotion, the Romantics
loved to experience and write about nature. They felt that
anything that could return or restore a human being to a more
natural state (such as emotion) is good, and since they found
nature to be so awe-inspiring and emotion-producing, they felt
that being in nature must be morally improving. As a result,
much of Shelley's poetry takes the wonders of nature as its
subject.

21. Conti….
 Some elements of Romanticism:
 a reaction against rationalism and efficiency
 a return to the natural
 an emphasis on emotion, and irrationality, rather than
rationality.
To see why Shelley is a Romantic poet take a
look at these elements in Shelley’s Ode to a Skylark. While
odes are usually to great men or creations of men, this ode
praises something natural, a bird. Moreover, the bird is praised
for its “unpremeditated art.” That is the bird didn’t plan or think
to make its song, it just poured out its emotions. And the
person looking at the bird doesn’t try to analyze it: “what thou
art we know not” Instead what is appreciated is “shrill
delight,” and “harmonious madness.” Readers are asked not
to analyze but to listen to the bird.

22. Conti….
 How does Percy Shelley's treatment of nature differ from
other Romantics?
Earlier Romantic poets were writing during the time of the
American and French revolutions, as well as the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution. The tone of energy,
transformation, renewal pervaded the poetry of the time, often
appearing as a "back to nature" theme. The idea of nature
became a source of refuge from the artificial and lent an
aesthetic, spiritual air to much of early Romantic poetry.
Wordsworth, for example, presented nature in a
philosophical light, with nature being the primary subject of
many of his poems. Both he and Coleridge wrote of the
healing, majestic, god-like power of nature.

23. Conti….
Shelley, however, often included nature merely as part of
a poem, or even as the backdrop to other themes and
images. Although he wrote of the mystical beauty of nature,
he also presented nature’s tendency towards dark power,
which cannot be fully controlled by humans.
Nature here is indifferent to the suffering of man, and the
poem is more about the speaker’s dark mood than it is about
the nature around him. In "Ozymandias" we see the indifferent
power of nature as it erases all evidence of a man who saw
himself as a god. The plaque at the feet of his time-ravaged
statue reads:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

24. Conti….
Yet we see that nature has not only destroyed his
statue but his entire kingdom and the memory of whom
he was:
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Again, the theme centers more on the insignificance
of man than on nature, which Shelley presents as
beautiful and powerful, but not benevolent, as the early
Romanticists envisioned.

25. THE END